There was no communal hymn-singing at the end of the recent Beer Business In 2015 conference, jointly organised by this paper and its sister publication, OLN, so no hymn sheets were necessary.
It was astonishing, nonetheless, to hear the harmonies wafting from the conference hall. There they were: statisticians, industry analysts, journalists, small brewers, big brewers, trade honchos, sales directors, importers, wholesalers, retailers and even a visionary entrepreneur or two, and by mid-afternoon the whole lot was beginning to resemble a gigantic barber-shop quartet.
What were they all agreeing about? That the image of beer needs a little sensitive restoration work, to begin with. That the packaging and marketing of beer is dismal. The price has become far too important as a sales mechanism, and quality dangerously unimportant. That women still find beer unattractive as a drink. That the entire category is perceived as unexciting and low in innovation.
Beer is just a commodity for most drinkers, in other words; they feel they have little to discover there. The ghost hovering over the proceedings took the shape of a large wine bottle: it looked like a jeroboam of Jacob's Creek to me. Wine, the undercurrent ran, had got it right, which was why it was steadily eating into beer's market share, year after year.
So then what happened over Christmas. The big brewers and retailers had a no-holds-barred slugfest of off-trade and on-trade price cutting and in-yer-face marketing in order to emerge afterwards covered in blood but claiming an extra 3.17% market share. The big guns were wheeled out to support the big brands, with anything considered niche fending for itself.